Where many an owl is spotted: loggers on welfare while spotted owls flourish - but ecologists don't give a hoot.

IN JANUARY, the United States Forest Service (USFS) set aside 7 million acres for the northern spotted owl. The cost--from 33,000 to 100,000 well paid logging industry jobs--is comparable to last month's GM layoffs of 74,000 auto workers. But the owl requires these "dwindling patches of the West's virgin forests" to survive, as the Wall Street Journal once reported.

Misreported, actually. There is an impressive array of evidence that spotted owls are thriving on millions of acres of privately and publicly managed second-groth forests--the kind that grow up after logging. This evidence was acknowledged by report of the Jack Ward Thomas Committee (composed of owl experts from USFS, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management and National Parks Service) which, however, declared the owl a "threatened species" under the terms of the Endangered Species Act and recommend setting aside vast old-growth reserves. But to do so, it had to ignore its own finding that "forest structure is more important than tree age" in determining a habitat's suitability for the owl.

The spotted owl requires a forest structure that consists of large trees with cavities or platforms of debris for nesting, multilayer tree canopies (trees of different heights) with moderate to high crown closure (viewed from above, the ground would be hidden), and ample dead and down woody material. The owl was declared threatened on the assumptions that clearcutting of such forests would wipe out a habitat that had taken well over a century to grow from bare ground. The problem with this reasoning is that there are many ways to preserve the necessary forest structure short of a complete ban on logging, or regulation so heavy it has the same effect.

Lowell Diller, a zoologist, has found some of the highest owl densities anywhere on 400,000 acres of land owned by the Simpson Timber Company, less than 2 per cent of which is old growth. For three years, Diller studied the northern spotted owl on Simpson's extensive holdings in the California redwood belt. His finding, fully peer reviewed by the American Ornithological Union and praised by the Thomas committee, demonstrate that second-growth forests can provide a suitable owl habitat.

This is important: 95 per cent of the redwoods in northern California are fast-growing second growth, which can reach a stunning 150 feet in fifty years. Perhaps the most remarkable property of redwoods, unique among American conifers, is an ability to sprout new growth right from a cutover stump and its roots. Moreover, coast redwood forest develop the needed multilayer canopy rapidly because the redwood's associated under-story species, tanaok, also stump sprouts. Because stump-sprouting is enhanced by full sunlight and retarded by shade, a consensus among north-coast foresters supports clearcutting--however unwise and unpopular it may be in other locations--as the best way to log redwoods.

Indeed, scientist believe that the sprouting redwood stumps make a habitat superior to old growth for two species the owl relies upon as prey in the region: the wood rat and the brush rabbit. Wood rats (80 per cent of the owl's diet in the redwood zone) build their elaborate stick nests (as high as 15 feet) around the sprouting stumps; their populations actually peak in young-growth stands (between ten and thirty years) and decline to nearly zero in old growth. The greater availability of prey can make managed forests a better owl habitat.

Steve Self, a wildlife biologist working for Sierra Pacific, the largest private timberland owner in California, stresses that, given a minimum of forest structure for nesting and roosting, it is the prey base that ultimately determines the suitability of the habitat. The wood rat thrives on the leafy vegetation that grows in clearcuts.

The owl thrives to the east of the California redwood zone, in the mixed conifer forests dominated by lofty stands of Douglas fir, pine, and true fir. Mr. Self notes that "this region has a history of selective harvesting [cutting individual trees] rather than clearcuts, so we have a mosaic of different forest conditions. So far, on our property which is mostly second growth, we have not found any areas where we do not have owls."

Since the owl was declared threatened in July of 1990, private lands in California have been logged only under comples U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulations. Mr Self notes, "the Fish and Wildlife Service says if we follow our written plan we will not 'take' [disrupt the biological processes of] any spotted owls. So they agree that we can manage our forests and have owls, too."

It may even be possible to extend the owl's range with artificial nests. Wildlife biologist Steve Kerns of Pacific Lumber has put up experimental nest boxes (analogous to the "wood duck" boxes put up by concerned citizens to save the wood duck in the early days of the environmental movement) in which spotted owls have successfully raised young. Diller believes even that level of intervention may be unnecessary in the redwood zone because owls use abandoned fying-squirrel and red-tree-vole nests.

These animals, along with the Pacific fisher (a weasel), are also often falsely cired in the press as doomed without rigid protection of old-growth forests. In fact, "we have seen Pacific fishers in second-growth stands and followed their tracks in the snow," Diller says.

Mainstream accounts miss other scientific subtleties. An important one is the difference, or lack thereof, between the northern spotted owl, officially another spotted owl, officially another subspecies. The California spotted owl, officially "non-threatened" for now, thrives in second-growth forests in the coast mountains that stretch from San Diego County to the south of San Francisco, as well as in the vast Sierra Nevadad. (A third subspecies, the Mexican spotted owl, proposed for "threatened" status last November, inhabits two mountain ranges that stretch from the five mountain states of the Southwest to central Mexico.)

The subspecies classification is controversial, in part, because the blood tests normally used to distinguish subspecies show no genetic difference between the northern and California owls. The two were declared separate under the belief that they were distinct populations which did not cross the Pitt River, which feeds into Lake Shasta. We now know that that is not true: owls have been found within a hundred yards of the river--and their range is two hundred miles. Because the bureaucracy has yet to catch up with science, we are paying an inordinate social cost, not to mention economic, to guard a "separate" population of northern owls.

The forests of the southern Sierra Nevadas, mostly second growth but leavened by the old-growth reserves in wilderness areas and Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, provide millions of acres of spotted-owl habitat. Moreover, in 1987 researchers for the USFS Pacific Southwest Experiment Station discovered spotted owls living year round in foothill canyons filled with oaks and sycamores at low elevations, miles from the higher altitude conifer forests--areas, in other words, that are dry and tough: not the sort of place "vulnerable" owls ought to appear. Indeed, a draft USFS report on an owl monitoring study of forested federal lands in California found owls on fully 75 per cent of all sites--sites selected randomly, "without regard to suitability for spotted-owl habitat."

Donald Neal, who retired recently after 34 years at the experiment station, notes that each pair of owls requires thousands of acres of habitat, and until recently were seldom observed by ornithologists. The likeliest error in the USFS study would be an undercount--indeed, the owl population in the Sierras may well "not be much lower that it was historically, because the selective logging done here accidentally produced the forest structure the owl requires."

This would explain why our actual counts of the "threatened" owl keep rising. A 1986 Audubon Society "blue ribbon" committee of owl experts concluded that owl-conservation efforts should be directed at maintaining a minimum population in Oregon, Washington, and California of 1,500 pairs of spotted owls, including 300 to 400 pairs of California owls thought to inhabit the Sierra Nevadas. Since then, spotted-owl counts have risen dramatically: the real count in Oregon and Washington alone stands at 2,170 nesting pairs and hundreds of single birds. California surveys during 1990 showed 1,868 owls (including both subspecies) on federal lands, and about 900 on private lands. Lowell Diller has found 350 northern owls on Simpson lands, which represent only about 8 per cent of productive private forests in northern California. These counts are not complete censuses, Gordon Gould of the California Fish and Game Department points out, because the land areas involved are simply too vast.

Which raises a question: Since the northern owl is less distinct and vulnerable than originally reported, and does not depend exclusively on the valuable land that has now been set aside for it, why have we put so many people out of work? The story common in timber and environmental circles alike is that the owl is just an excuse to preserve the old-growth forests, long a goal for environmentalists. The endangered species act was just the best law on the books for that purpose.

One can understand the impulse to preserve natural beauty, but while some companies mismanage land, many more do as well or better than the government. An industry group, the Northwest Forestry Association, calculates that there are some 19 millions acres of publicly held forest in Oregon and Washington in which logging is already barred; over a third of that area is old growth, and some four million acres are suitable spotted-owl habitat. And there are other goods besides preserving old growth that we need to pursue--even other environmental goods.

Some argue we need to preserve "biodiversity," a diversity of species and habitats. But as Diller points out, "a mosaic of younger and older forests yields more biodiversity than an unbroken expanse of old-growth forest."

Sensible environmental scientists like Diller and Neal may yet be heard in environmental and government circles--even if the media continue to ignore them. Latty Irwin, a former wildlife biology professor and the author of a large body of spotted-owl research, is now wildlife program director for the National Council for Air and Stream improvements in Corvallis, Oregon. "I don't know that managed forests can accomodate spotted owls across the entire geographic range of the owl, but I am very confident that we can do it in California, parts of Oregon, and parts of the east side of the Cascades in Washington. . . . The distribution of the owl's requirements--food, cover, and water--is certainly broader than old-growth forests. In the long run, we must have a balance."

Even our political system may eventually produce that. All but the greenest of the region's politicians are moving to support Interior Secretary Lujan's reexamination, of the spotted owl decisions. Owl, spare that woodman.

Mr. Rice is a forester who writes on environmental issues from Oakhurst, California.